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Photography education and entertainment site PhoozL announces its latest “super-judged” (and first paid-entry) photo contest: ‘Show the Song: Spirit of the ‘60s’. The assignment is to interpret 1960s Classic Rock song titles with your photography. And the judge is Elliott Landy, official photographer of the 1969 Woodstock Festival! How groovy is that? This is PhoozL’s first paid-entry contest ($5), and entrants can upload up to 5 submissions for that one fee. The contest is open for submissions now until March 24 to all logged-in members of Phoozl.com, amateur to pro, 18+, worldwide. There are prizes for Top 3 and Honorable Mentions. To see more details and to submit, go to:

– Photography education and entertainment site PhoozL announces its latest “super-judged” (and first paid-entry) photo contest: ‘Show the Song: Spirit of the ‘60s’. The assignment is to interpret 1960s Classic Rock song titles with your photography. And the judge is Elliott Landy, official photographer of the 1969 Woodstock Festival! How groovy is that? This is PhoozL’s first paid-entry contest ($5), and entrants can upload up to 5 submissions for that one fee. The contest is open for submissions now until March 24 to all logged-in members of Phoozl.com, amateur to pro, 18+, worldwide. There are prizes for Top 3 and Honorable Mentions. To see more details and to submit, go to:

“We’re very excited to have official Woodstock Festival photographer Elliott Landy judge this contest,” says Harald Johnson, PhoozL’s founder. “Elliott was there to capture the ‘60s rock music scene, so who better to judge our first paid-entry, music-themed challenge.”

About Elliott Landy

Elliott Landy is best known for his iconic photographs of rock musicians and as official photographer of the 1969 Woodstock Festival. His photographs have appeared on the covers of such magazines as Rolling Stone, LIFE, and The Saturday Evening Post. Landy’s portraits have also graced the covers of many of the best-known albums of the era, including such classics as Bob Dylan’s “Nashville Skyline,” Van Morrison’s “Moondance,” and The Band’s second album, “The Band.” Elliott still lives in Woodstock, New York. Visit his website at:

PhoozL® (http://www.phoozl.com) provides photo education and entertainment for photographers and photo enthusiasts who want to be challenged and have “phun” while learning more about photography and stretching their creative wings. Photo contests, photo assignments, photo critiques, photo learning, photo sharing and community… it’s all part of PhoozL.

I’ve been using the new Lexar Multi-Card 25-in-1 card reader for image transfer. It is a multi-card reader because you can access multiple cards simultaneously and you can do card to card transfers.

Being USB 3.0 the transfers are fast (depending on the memory card) and very reliable. I’ve had no issues at all with the unit while I’ve been using it.

The Lexar Multi-Card 25-in-1 USB 3.0 Reader leverages SuperSpeed USB 3.0 technology to offer high-speed file transfers with a USB interface read speed of up to 500MB/s, and is up to five times faster than USB 2.0.* The reader also features a convenient pop-up design mechanism to protect the card slots when the reader is not in use and comes with a USB 3.0 cable cord. A blue LED activity light lets users know when data is being transferred.

The new Expression XP-400 offers busy households and students superior performance with exceptional features at an affordable price. Its built-in Wi-Fi CERTIFIED™ n allows multiple users to print at faster speeds and broader ranges.(2) The Expression XP-400 also offers convenient scanning and copying, advanced image enhancement tools, and all-pigment DURABrite Ultra ink for crisp documents and lab-quality photos.

EPSON Connect Mobile PrintingEpson offers several ways to print from tablets and smartphones with EPSON Connect. Users can conveniently print documents, photos, e-mail, and web pages from their home or office, even across the globe with the new Expression XP-400, and a smartphone, tablet or computer.

Email Print – Remotely send documents and photos directly to an EPSON printer’s unique e-mail address to easily print from a smartphone or other mobile device

EPSON iPrint™ – Print web pages, Microsoft Office documents, photos, and PDFs over a wireless network with this free app; also scan and save files on a mobile device, send it as an e-mail or upload it to a cloud service such as Box.net, Dropbox, Evernote® or Google Docs™

Eco-friendly features, including ENERGY STAR® qualified, RoHS compliant and designed to be recycled(4)

Pricing and AvailabilityThe EPSON Expression Home XP-400 ($99.99*) will be available in June through major computer, office and electronic superstores, a variety of retail stores nationwide and Epson’s retail site, www.epsonstore.com. For more information, please visit www.epson.com.

About EpsonEpson is a global imaging and innovation leader whose product lineup ranges from inkjet printers and 3LCD projectors to sensors and other microdevices. Dedicated to exceeding the vision of its customers worldwide, Epson delivers customer value based on compact, energy-saving, and high-precision technologies in markets spanning enterprise and the home to commerce and industry. Led by the Japan-based Seiko Epson Corporation, the Epson Group comprises more than 75,000 employees in 97 companies around the world, and is proud of its ongoing contributions to the global environment and the communities in which it operates. To learn more about Epson, please visit http://global.epson.com.

Specifications are subject to change without notice. EPSON, DURABrite and Expression are registered trademarks, EPSON Exceed Your Vision is a registered logomark, and EPSON Connect and EPSON iPrint are trademarks of Seiko Epson Corporation. BorderFree is a registered trademark, and Small-in-One is a trademark of Epson America, Inc. All other product and brand names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Epson disclaims any and all rights in these marks

I found my system was spending a lot of time running a process called fontd. Also Photoshop on startup would spend time dealing with fonts. Thankfully the fix is easy.

Use the Font Book application to find and disable duplicate fonts. I’ve done this on both my and my wife’s laptops and it has made a big difference. Photoshop starts up faster and certain applications (I noticed it with Powerpoint) become much more responsive. You’ll find Font Book in the Applications folder.

I use a MacBook Pro 15″ for much of my work. It is a great machine that mixes suitable portability with a decent sized screen and can run a much larger screen when I’m in the office. Love it.

But there are times when it gets really slow and unresponsive. I’ve been investigating this for some time and have slowly removed things that were not helping. But still today my machine went really slow and I decided I had enough of it. Running Activity Monitor (Applications/Utilities) showed the culprit to be Flash, both in Chrome and in Safari, which were both open. I stopped the Chrome Plug-in (Window -> Task Manager) and closed the tabs that had Flash running. I also closed Safari. My machine came back to life, being responsive and fast. So there lay the problem, Flash. I am in the habit of leaving multiple tabs open in my browsers on content I want to look at later and this was killing me if there was Flash content on the page, usually crap I didn’t want anyway, like adds.

So I decided it was time to get rid of Flash once and for all. At the system level you remove the Flash plugin by going to Library/Internet Plug-Ins/ on your boot disk and removing them or (as I did) moving into another folder the files Flash Player.plugin and flashplayer.xpt. This removes Flash from Safari after a reboot.

To remove Flash from Chrome (or rather force Chrome to use the system plugin, which is now gone) you type About:Plugins into the Address field and disable Flash.

You may be asking how I can do without Flash. Well, much of the time I view the web on my iPad. That handles most things well, including playing Youtube videos. I don’t like Flash games and most Flash on normal web pages is ads, which I don’t want to be annoyed with anyway. If I have trouble with this approach I’ll re-enable the built-in Flash plugin in Chrome and simply use Chrome for viewing such content. At least I know now how to just kill the Flash plugin in Chrome anytime it is slowing my machine down.

The Nikon D800 seems to be generating far more buzz and interest than other cameras released recently. Why is this?

On first sight it can be pure technological lust – here is a camera with a MUCH higher resolution than anything with a 35mm camera price tag. You need to go to medium format to find anything that competes on resolution. Is this all the interest is – size matters? I think the answer is partly yes, but only partly.

I think a lot of photographers are craving more flexibility in their cameras. This is one reason why so many of us accept the limitations but use our iPhones for a lot of photography. It is convenient and also flexible because of the enhancement of the shooting experience that apps bring us. One key part of flexibility is the ability to crop and crop savagely. With a digital camera this requires resolution and guess which camera is top of the heap on that regard at present? The D800.

Life is complex, we have so many competing demands on our time and there seems to be less time available to actually shoot. Think about the implications of having so much resolution available. I can go out with a 70-200, say, and crop to get the shot I might have taken if I had a 400, 600 or even higher focal length lens with me, without the hassle of paying for and carrying the damn thing, let along the time and possibly missed shots spent changing lenses, and still end up with an image with more resolution than I actually need for the end uses I have in mind. Yes I can use cropping as a substitute for swapping lenses or even having such a lens in the first place. This allows me to move the decision making to later, when I am sitting in front of a nice, large computer screen. It gives me flexibility in how I use my images later. I can really afford to not crop so tightly in camera and choose later whether I want a landscape, portrait or square shaped image.

Frankly, right now, if I had the spare cash I would get a D800 and a good lens or two even though I own Canon gear. It would make some of my landscape photography trips much easier. Even when going on holiday it would mean one camera and one lens could do it all, because I could crop the hell out of images to produce the shots I would have needed a telephoto lens for. One of the most common questions I get asked in my workshops is whether people can get away with just one lens when going on international holidays. The answer has always been that to get the range of focal lengths you need in one lens produces compromises in image quality. If you can get by with a much shorter focal length range and then crop to get the long end it becomes feasible at a higher image quality.

Photography should be fun and let’s be honest, it is not fun carrying a lot of heavy lenses around and having to swap them all the time. Having more resolution than you need gives you options. Use them.

A roundup of some of the things about photography on the Internet that I found interesting this week.

I guess the most interesting thing to occur this week was the announcement of the new Canon 5D Mark III with only a minor change in resolution compared to the previously announced Nikon D800’s massive jump in resolution. As you would imagine the debate has been furious on various discussion forums and blogs.

My personal take on this is that there is a place for both cameras and it would be a really good idea for Canon to bring out an additional model that ups the resolution massively. The 5D Mark III provides plenty of resolution for many situations. However, and this is a big however, there are many situations when a much higher resolution camera would be a real plus. I shoot landscapes a lot, so I am not so worried about shooting rates, time to write to the memory card or even HD video capabilities. I want a camera I can take into the field that works well and gives me more than enough resolution to be able to crop substantially later in the studio depending on my intended image use and still print at a large size. This means turning landscape to portrait orientations, as well as creating panoramas by cropping. Even in the landscape things can change in the time it takes to take both a landscape and portrait orientation shot, such as birds being in the perfect location in the sky. This makes the ability to radically crop very attractive. So I would love to see Canon produce a 6D (say) with a 40-50MP sensor and, ideally, the ability to remove the IR blocking filter from the light path at the press of a button. This would be a dream camera for landscape photographers, and also many others, such as people shooting art works and such.

Apart from the above, not that much caught my eye this week on the web, but here it is: